Thursday, January 14, 2016

The following is an article that I wrote for a young relative just out of school trying to get their first job in the tech industry. It's not specifically about security, but it applies to most software engineering jobs.The interview process is multi step. First, you need to get a recruiter or HR person to notice your resume. Then you’ll have to pass at least one phone screen, then you’ll have an in-person interview. It’s a chain, so you have to pass every single hurdle to get a job. You can’t screw up any of them. Here are some strategies that I find work.

Resume

First priority: Your resume is the first impression of you. Make it the best you can.

Keywords: Most automatic resume robots just read keywords. If you don’t have the right keywords, you won’t get noticed. Keywords are going to be “software Engineer”, Java, Python, C++, HTML, IP/TCP/UDP, Android, IPhone, virtualization, VMWare, Visual Basic, SQL, HTML”.Don’t be afraid to work “cloud” or "Amazon EC2” onto there if you have experience.

SWEngineer: Please call yourself a software engineer. I don’t like “developer”. A developer just writes lines of code. An engineer builds large and complex systems out of code.

Projects: Put a blurb about what you did in class. Use words like “Member of a team that implemented …” or “Personally implemented …”. Just 1-2 sentences on each class is fine, but try to distill down what it is that you personally did. If your resume says "implemented BASE64 in C", I’ll ask you questions about the implementation. If you say “uh, I didn’t actually implement it, I wrote the header file with the APIs, the rest of the team did the work”, then I won’t be impressed. If your say “member of a team that implemented BASE64”, then I’ll ask about your team responsibility and how you dealt with the team dynamics. It’s also good if you can say “led the team that implemented BASE64”.

Projects pt2: If it is on your resume, it’s fair game for me to ask you about it. If you are asked about a recent project that is on your resume and can’t answer coherently, that’s bad. Make sure if it’s on your resume you can speak about it.

Keep a short resume: After 20 years, mine is only 2 pages. When I read 5 page resumes, I just get grumpy that they can’t distill down their experience for me. It’s really hard work to maintain a 2 page resume as you get more experience, but do it.

Experience: Every 6 months, touch up your resume with what you have done. What you’ll find is that the last project that took 4 sentences to explain and takes up 2 inches of resume space was really shiny at the time but isn’t nearly as cool as the newer thing you did. Feel free to cut older stuff back down to 1 sentence. I know you worked hard on those 4 sentences, but they don’t matter anymore, you have something shinier.

Complete: If the interviewer or recruiter says “I didn’t know you did that”, then you screwed up. Put it on your resume. Especially in the first few years out of school.

github: Put your github.com site on your resume. A technical interviewer who is really interested in you will look at it. Make sure that you touch it every so often. Maybe place a project on there and just work on it occasionally, even a website or a node.js project to do something silly.

LinkedIn: It's great to have your linkedin profile on your resume. In my opinion, your resume should be short and catch people’s attention. Your LinkedIn page should have more details about what you do and your passions. I update my linkedIn every few months.

LinkedIn pt2: Culture your LinkedIn profile as your professional internet persona. Everything you do there should be professional and polished and shine a good light on you. Collect powerful mentors on LinkedIn and make good connections. Don’t accept every connection though, stick with people you actually know.

Facebook, etc: As an interviewer, I never look at someone’s Facebook page. I don’t care what you do in your spare time. I do expect my HR people have looked around the internet and made sure that you pass a sniff test and are not a complete maniac. Facebook, etc. should not be embarrassing for you. (Duh)

Contact methods: As a security & privacy advocate, I never put my address on my resume. Only my phone and personal email address. And I think adding the phone is being generous. If recruiters want to contact me, first it should be via email (or LinkedIn) and set up a phone call for later. That’s what I do as a hiring manager and what I expect any recruiter to do.

Resume format: PDF!! Yes, your resume needs to fit on 8.5x11 paper. Yes, it should look nice. But you will probably never send a paper resume to anyone; you’ll send it electronically. Make it look nice electronically and if it doesn’t look as good on paper, who cares. I greatly prefer PDF to MSWord or any other format. You can make hyperlinks out. And best of all, PDF is very good at looking the same no matter what viewer anyone uses.

Recruiters

Recruiters: Their job is to find qualified candidates but not waste the time of the engineers who will be doing the interviewing. They have a quota so they want to send you to a phone screen. Your job is to convince them that you won’t waste anyone’s time. Try to suss out what they think the hiring manager needs (see later) and convince them that you can solve that problem.

Technology: Recruiters often don’t have a technical background. To get past them, you need to be professional and polite and sound like you know what you are doing. If they do have technology background, then your job is still the same only now you get to talk deeper about technology. That’s even better.

Think like a recruiter: They will take less than 30 seconds to look at your resume. Make them be interested in you. Highlight personal projects and things you’ve done to make yourself stand out. If you were a tech recruiter and had to speak with 20 uninteresting nerds per day, you’d want to find someone who stands out. Show some passion for some accomplishment of yours.

Think like a recruiter pt 2: Make your resume clearly state what you want to be. Many recruiters I speak with say that they don’t know what to do with schizophrenic resumes — like mine when I couldn’t figure out if I was a manager or an architect. Figure out what you want to do and make sure your resume reflects that.

Recruiter pt 3: They will likely ask you some canned technical questions. Don’t be afraid to say “I don’t know, can I get back to you after I’ve studied that?” They’ll be impressed that you admitted you don’t know and that you want to study for the job.

College grads: Show enthusiasm and a willingness to learn. Clearly you don’t have much experience, so you need something to stand out. One of the best out-of-college hires I ever made was a person who just said “I don’t know” to a number of very hard questions. I hired her because she had enthusiasm and demonstrated a willingness to learn.

Phone screen

Phone screen: Ok you made it past the first tier. Congratulations. The phone screeners job is to decide if you will waste other engineers time if you come in the office for a full loop. He doesn’t have a hiring quota, so he’s much more likely to reject you. On the other hand, he’s probably on the team and he knows better what skills are needed in a new team member.

Screener: Do some homework. Find his LinkedIn page. Don’t try to connect with him, just make sure you know who he is (don’t be creepy). Try to study some of the areas in which you know he works. Most likely he’ll answer questions in that area.

Engineer: The phone screener is likely already an engineer. He’s also likely to be someone you will work with closely. He will know more than you and will ask hard questions. Find out what he does and what he needs (again, see later).

“I don’t know”: Don’t be afraid to say it. It’s not a sin to say “I don’t know”, but it is a sin to not try to know. “I don’t know, can you help me?”, or better yet “I don’t know the answer to that but I know about this small portion of it. I’d like to know how that fits into the big picture.” This is same as with the recruiter, but now you are in the technology world. Try to understand the tech as deeply as possible, that will impress the person.

Just out of school: If you are just out of school, interviewers are looking for someone who can they can grow into a good engineer. The only way that they can know that is if you demonstrate the ability to think on your own.

Code questions: I prefer to do thought exercises over the phone, not straight coding. However, Google Docs has made it easier for someone to see you code. Don’t be nervous about exact syntax, make sure you get the algorithm. If you realize you made a syntax error, correct it but don’t fuss over it. Think big picture.

Interview process

Interview: You made it this far. Congratulations. Each interviewer you see will likely report back to the manager or the next person right after your interview. Assume they communicate.

Format: I like five or six 45 minute interviews with different team members and a lunch with the hiring manager. Be prepared for different interview styles. Some people ask puzzle questions, some want to get to know you, some will make you write code.

Interview styles: Individuals interview differently. Be prepared.

puzzle-master: Asks brain puzzles to see how you think.

Try to show that you are analytical and think your way out of problems.

These are the easiest interviews - or so you think. These folk want to see if you know everything you said you’ve done.

Resume: Take paper copies of your resume with you (Yes, I know this contradicts earlier advice about electronic resumes). If an interviewer walks in to see you without your resume in his hand, politely offer a copy. Many times, the recruiter sends an electronic copy to the interview loop. The interviewer (because she’s extremely busy doing other things) probably glanced at it but has spent less than 5 minutes with it.

Blabbing: If there is a lull in the conversation or if they were unprepared and want to look at your resume, then start to tell them about your latest project or an interesting project while they read your resume.

Bio: Good interviewers offer to let you take a break or ask you if you need anything. The last thing you need is a full bladder or a dry mouth in a high pressure situation. Take them up on their offer for water or a bio break.

Hiring Manager: If you are lucky enough to get to speak to the hiring manager, then you are doing well.

Most important advice in this blog: Find out what pain the hiring manager has. Convince him you can erase that pain. If his problem is that the app is 2 months behind schedule and they need someone who can write SQL until the project ships, then you’ll be writing SQL for the next 2 months. If you can’t write SQL, ask if you can take workload from another team member who can write SQL. I cannot stress this enough. This will get you the job. Hiring managers are the ones making the decision. Impress them.

Interviewee/er: You as an interviewee are also interviewing them. If the team snipes at each other or is dismissive of you or anyone else or any red flags go up, you may consider saying no to the job. Dysfunction ain’t cool.

Finishing it up: I always like to say “thank you for your time” to anyone I interviewed, whether I plan to hire them or not. You should tell your interviewers, “Thank you for your time.” They are busy. They might even be annoyed that they have to interview a noob like you. If you are gracious and humble they’ll be more likely to hire you.

Misc:

Title: You’ll probably start off as a Software Engineer 1. You’ll progress to SW2, then SW3, then Senior SWEng. Then Principal Engineer or Architect or you can move into a management track. In a good org, there’ll be very good criteria on what it takes to move from 1 -> 2 -> 3. After that, advancement gets to be murky. Generally, to move up from Senior, you need to tackle a project no one else will tackle or build something amazing that no one else could build. Or demonstrate solid team leadership.

Title pt 2: My take is that title doesn’t mean much. Get some experience, find out what you want to do, then find a path to Sr SW Eng.

Salary: I’m no good at giving advice on this. Maybe you can look up local salaries on the internet.